The mother of a schoolgirl who was allegedly lured into a car in an Asda carpark by three men who then drugged and repeatedly raped her has told of her horror at learning of her ordeal.
The girl was allegedly ‘passed around like a receptacle’ by Ivan Turtak, 38, Kevin Horvath, 25, and Ernest Gunar, 27 after they offered her a cigarette to get her into their car.
Today in harrowing testimony the mother of the alleged victim wept as she told how she discovered what had happened after her daughter returned following the two-day ordeal.
The woman, who cannot be named, recalled the events of last August when the youngster disappeared from her hometown in Kent following an argument with her grandfather and was finally discovered by police in Dover two days later.
With mascara running down her face, the mother described how her partner had gone to get the girl – and as soon as she learned what her daughter said had happened she was immediately intent on ensuring that evidence of what had happened should be preserved.
In an agonising 35-minute testimony at Canterbury Crown Court, the woman, told the jury: ‘When we got home from Dover [my husband] and [my daughter] went upstairs.
‘[My husband] came down and told me [my daughter] said she had been kidnapped, drugged and raped.
‘She said there were three men.
‘I called the police straight away.
‘The clothes she came home in were not the clothes she was wearing when she went missing.
‘I made her take them off and put them in a bag for the police. And I made her put the first urine sample in a pot.
‘I knew that if I took those measures, that these men [accused of raping her daughter] would be found.’
She said: ‘As soon as [my husband] told me what happened I took the clothes and put them in a bag.
‘Police came and took hand and mouth swabs from [my daughter] and took the bag of clothing.’
Speaking of the aftermath of her experience, the woman continued: ‘[My daughter] was absolutely terrified.
‘She told me she wanted to die.
‘She went very withdrawn, a completely different child.’
In a statement read out in court the girl’s father said his daughter had described being taken to a ‘dirty caravan’ with ‘yellow curtains’ where attackers proposed trafficking her abroad.
He said: ‘She said the men took her to a caravan.
‘She described one man as tall and skinny and another as short and fat.
‘She described the caravan. It had yellow curtains and was dirty and was parked on a road with houses opposite.
‘She said people came to the window because the men in the caravan were selling drugs.
‘She said they asked her if she had a passport and said something about Germany.
‘When they were asleep, she opened the door. The sun was just coming up, it must have been about 3.30am.
‘She said she ran for ten minutes solid. Then she saw a sign ‘Welcome to Dover’.
Earlier in the trial the court heard how the youngster was drugged and repeatedly raped by the three men – Ivan Turtak, Kevin Horvath and Ernest Gunar – who had lured her into their car with the promise of a cigarette after spotting her in an Asda car park.
Turtak, 38, Horvaty, 25 and Gunar, 27, are allegedly to have passed the child around ‘like a receptacle’ as they subjected her sexual abuse.
A jury at Canterbury Crown Court heard the men were ‘complete strangers’ to the girl who was ‘targeted and exploited’.
They drove her in Horvath’s Skoda to Turtak’s flat in Dover, Kent, after promising to give her a cigarette, the court was told.
It is alleged she was then taken to Gunar’s caravan on Arthur Street in Folkestone, Kent, where she was plied with illicit substances, subjected to more rape and other sexual acts.
It was said the men threatened to kill her if she tried to escape or call for help and took a picture of her standing naked in a bathtub.
Turtak has pleaded guilty to taking an indecent image of a child but denies raping her.
Horvath admitted three charges of rape and one of assault by penetration of the girl but pleaded not guilty to sexual assault of a child.
Gunar pleaded guilty to one offence of rape but denies assault of a child by penetration, sexual assault of a child and two offences of rape.
Prosecutor Hannah Llewellyn-Waters told the jury by virtue of those pleas, the men had demonstrated not only their ‘sexual interest’ in the child but also ‘as a matter of fact’ that offending behaviour had occurred.
She added that the issue for the jury to decide was whether the exact sexual activity they denied had in fact taken place.
Tests revealed traces of crystal meth and THC – the psychoactive compound in cannabis – in her system.